Ouch, My Head

It’s not the paragraphs that are difficult to get down on paper, it’s the transition sentences between them. I suppose this hints at the fact that I don’t know exactly where I’m going if I can’t seem to get from one section to the next. 

This is the type of honest thing I would like to say to my supervisor (if we ever talked.) I’d say “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Help me.” But I think he hates weakness and would only sort of kick my carcass with the end of his boot before stepping over me. “Keep plugging!” He would say hopelessly as he walked away. 

Why is it that I am convinced that I know exactly what I’m doing until I actually sit down and write it? Then it ends up in a pile of rubble on the floor of my word document and I am left feeling hopeless. 

I can’t believe this article is due in two months. And I can’t believe I am traveling internationally to tell people what I have discovered. 

I am lapsing into the old habit of writing by refusing to write anything. I will type out ridiculous instructions to myself in my paper like “here is where you will stick the section on Michael Ignatieff (hint: he’s an ass!)” 

The problem is, I am terrible at going back and making good on the promise of these little instructions. So I allow myself to think I am doing more writing than I actually am. And then I end up going back and covering old ground that I should have just written the first time. 

I suppose nobody sits down and writes a book they way it is read in final draft (except my supervisor.) So this style of writing would be acceptable if I didn’t use it as a procrastination tool. 

Here is the paragraph I am struggling to analyze right now. My first instincts about evidence are usually wrong, so I’m letting it gestate for a while. Another brilliant procrastination! A prison doctor’s report from 1883:

The state of things is by no means easily maintained – the small size of the cells, the defective sewerage, together with other matters more directly referable to the original location and design of this Penitentiary, render it more obnoxious to disease, than if of more modern construction. The massing together also of men, most of whom are of low moral type, with confirmed filthy habits, and broken down constitutions inherited and acquired, offer facilities for the advancement of disease, which demands the most humane and vigilant effort to avert… 

This passage is clearly about sewage, right? 

I’m going to stop using the word dialectical. I’m forced to admit that I have no idea what I’m talking about when I use it and things will get better for me if I just stop. 

Why am I always trying to write about how something is “revealed” by the material in my chapter? I write this way without really having any idea as to how anything will be revealed by what I am about to say. So apparently I hope that some magic trick will occur and my meaning will be clear to everyone but me. 

This is one of those fictions that my writing is based upon. That it all means something. Maybe it means nothing, but this will never be “revealed” by my introduction or conclusion. Only the inadequacies of the evidence.